The Laundry Room Plan

Folks, our latest and greatest house project is the laundry room.  It's really a hallway between our kitchen and master bedroom that houses the office on one side and the laundry on the other. Right now, other than the appliances, we have a some shelves holding laundry stuff and other miscellaneous, and there is an empty file cabinet. (doh!) Take a peek.

That's where the clutter is! This was never the intended end point, but just a get-through-a-few-years situation. So, what we need in here is a sink so that Tyler can have somewhere else to wash up his oil stained hands while I'm prepping dinner. You get it.  So we need a sink, countertop, dirty laundry storage, and some basic household storage (detergent, cleaning supplies, ironing stuff, etc.). I didn't want to introduce any new materials or colors this far into the project, so after some discussion, here's the master plan.

What we have is a simple mahogany cabinet with plywood fronts and a solid top, just like our master bathroom vanity. I've made 4 large drawers that will house the dirty laundry (inspiration here). In order to anchor the space and make it feel more finished, I've settled on painting just the back wall in our favorite "deep space" blue/grey. (Note: diehards will notice this is the first proposed painted wall in the house that is NOT white. Contain it.)

I've put in a little color detail (not too much!) by adding a small shelf that is a nice bright red/orange to house the hand soap, fast orange, nail brush, what have you. (Tyler says this detail may be costly/complicated, so we'll see.) I've also slapped a small pegboard on the wall to hold some basic tools we want to have accessible like scissors, tape, ruler, etc.

Of course, budget is a factor in many of these decisions. (We can make the countertop! Painting a wall is inexpensive!) We're hoping to have a professional make the cabinet boxes, and then we can install.

As I mentioned in the last post, I designed this with Google SketchUp. It's all to scale! Seriously, it was really handy to change out the colors and materials with a click of a button. I'm definitely a beginner, but I was just happy that it was useful for making decisions. I'm excited to show it to our cabinet guy for a bid!  huzzah!